News Corp set to bid adieu to MySpace

Once America most popular networking site MySpace owned by media giant News Corp is going to be sold out sometime this week, according to a person familiar with decision.

There are numbers of buyer which have been eyeing to buy California based company but MySpace did not arrive on decision whom to sell according to the person who spoke to some media persons on condition of anonymity. According to source at least three buyers— global media player Specific Media, Golden Gate Capital and Texas based Austin ventures are in race to bid it.

News Corp bought MySpace in $580 million in 2005 when social networking spectrum was in nascent stage. At this stage MySpace is looking to go through the deal which is likely to settle either by Wednesday or Thursday before the fiscal year ends for MySpace, which ends this Thursday. The person said the deal price will likely to be much higher and include a combination of cash and stock.

Back in 2003 when MySpace came in to existence it was widely used by American amateur music bands to upload and showcase their music. Right from there MySpace lost its core audience, however the company ruled the roost of networking space in 2007 and became numero uno till April 2008 in US.

Later Facebook took over and MySpace continued to melt under the hovering popularity of Facebook. Lack of corporate planning and series of strategic mistakes drove MySpace towards sad demise. MySpace features like user’s ability to adjust the profile was largely appreciated, however its decision to allow users to insert HTML in to their profile was not well received. Many industry experts have addressed this added feature to be a reason for people’s fading interest in MySpace.

MySpace never focussed to integrate itself from the rest of the web and do not have feature like port outside material in to user’s profile, meanwhile this feature was well assorted with Facebook. Consequently MySpace continued to suffer its revenue which throttled innovation at large but never thought to raise revenue through outside brands as Facebook.

In an attempt to minimise losses MySpace witnessed an extensive job cuts in October, later on at the start of this year it cut nearly half of its staff, or about 500 people. Currently MySpace has about 500 people. Even after cutting the major chunk of employee, MySpace has not breathed comfortably. In this year MySpace lost $165 million, worse than the $150 million loss it reported last year, primarily because of lower advertising revenue on the website.